Microsoft cleans up MSN, integrates Facebook, Twitter

Microsoft is previewing its latest version of the MSN webpage. The changes are …

Microsoft today unveiled a preview of its new MSN website, publicly viewable over at preview.msn.com. The new site, which the software giant is touting as "its most significant homepage redesign in over a decade" will become broadly available in the US early next year. Microsoft's number one website will soon come with a new MSN butterfly logo (which is supposed to be complementary to the Bing logo, hint: notice the font), a larger Bing search box and more integration with the search engine, local information from a new feature dubbed MSN Local Edition, as well as the addition of three social network streams: the Windows Live "What's New" feed of course, Facebook, and Twitter. We had a chance to talk to Lisa Gurry, Senior Director of MSN, to find out exactly what the company is showing off in the preview, and what else is yet to come.

The biggest change you'll notice with the new MSN homepage is how much cleaner it looks, and that's not just because it ditches the blue background for a white one. Microsoft claims that the new site has 50 percent fewer links than the previous homepage. If you look at them side-by-side (old, new), you'll see that this is definitely true. This change comes with a downside, however, as most of the links are now in the following six categories: News, Entertainment, Sports, Money, Lifestyle, and More. That means that while the page is much cleaner, it's an extra click to get to most of the links available on the page. Microsoft claims that it performed extensive customer research to find that people want less clutter and easier access to information and services they care about, and this is the result of their findings.

According to Gurry, the inline videos that appear in some of these categories and elsewhere throughout the site, will by default use Flash. They will show higher-quality Silverlight videos if Microsoft's plugin is installed on the user's computer (to be implemented later next year, if it hasn't been already). That said, there will also be a Silverlight App Bar that will arrive next year, which will ask to install Silverlight.

The tabbed approach

Microsoft took a while to embrace tabs in Internet Explorer (and still hasn't in Windows Live Messenger by the way), but the company has had information split into tabs on its websites for years. Now though, they've gone tab-crazy with the new MSN. It seems that every module on the new site has tabs, even Hotmail, which only has one tab and doesn't appear to give any option to add other e-mail services as tabs.

The new homepage continues to pull news and entertainment information from sources such as MSNBC, FOX Sports, Hulu, and Hearst. Again, all this information is categorized into tabs. Also, Microsoft is making sure to add a Bing search bar to every module that could possibly have a use for it. It's especially prominent in areas that Bing particularly excels at: shopping, travel, and local, but also with the ones it's not particularly exceptional with: highlighting hot topics, trends, and people.

Customization is dead and speed is king

While Gurry didn't put it as bluntly as that, she did say "our research has shown us that the larger majority of users don't want to take the time to customize their homepage." As such, none of the modules you see on the homepage can be removed: they can only be hidden. Yes, the new MSN homepage is pretty much against customization. In fact, the "Customize" tab in the top right is going to be renamed to "Settings." It has links to tour the new homepage, turn off Autosuggest, learn about search suggestions, change the font size, and access the MSN Directory, MyMSN, and MSN Latino.

So what's Microsoft doing after cutting down on the customization options? It's automating what content is shown to the user ("personally relevant information" Microsoft calls it). Over time, the new MSN website will learn what type of links you click on and will start choosing headlines for you based on the data it gathers. The headlines will also be presented in a tabbed format: Latest, News, Sports, TV & Movies, Money, Games, and Featured. However, these tabs will be programmable by the editor team, Gurry told us, so when the Olympics are happening, for example, there will be an Olympics tab, and say on the weekend, it will be more likely for there to be an Entertainment tab, and so on.

The MSN Local Edition seemed to be the feature that Gurry was most proud about, but we're not particularly excited as it's US-only. It aggregate local news, weather, sports, movies & events, restaurants, traffic & gas, into one place, sure, but it will be US-only at launch. The information it gathers is based off Bing (which limits many of its features to the US) and other content partners. Microsoft noted that the real-time community information provided is grouped by ZIP code.

Despite the cleaner look, the site seems to have much more functionality, so we wanted to know how the new site performs, compared to the old one. "It's designed to be significantly faster," Gurry told Ars. "We don't have any metrics right now." She did say that Microsoft might release some of the data once the new site is finalized and goes live in early 2010. Gurry did agree with us that speed was important nowadays and that the team had made sure to pay particular attention to this area.

Finally, Microsoft also took the opportunity to pat itself on the back for doing so great with the MSN website. The software giant used various sources to conclude that nearly 100 million people in the US visit MSN every single month, the site added over 10 million new customers in the last year alone, and that overall 600 million monthly use MSN. "At the end of the day, our goal is to supply the best homepage on the Web," Gurry told Ars. "We expect to roll out several new features over the next few months."